‘We’ve become the Government that wants to lock down Wendy houses. Boris has been totally captured by Whitty and Vallance. It’s insane.’..... So this week his colleagues will launch a hostage rescue mission. The Brady Amendment, which would require Ministers to secure parliamentary approval for any further extension of lockdown, will be voted on. ...There are several reasons why the patience of Conservative MPs has finally snapped. One is that advisers Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance are seen to be massively over-reaching their brief. At the start of the pandemic, the strategy was clear. Introduce temporary restrictions, ‘squash the sombrero’ that represented Covid’s advance through the population, and protect the NHS. But Ministers and MPs believe Boris’s advisers have persuaded him to sign up to a ‘zero-Covid’ strategy of complete eradication of the virus – something many scientists say is impossible to achieve in a large, open country such as Britain.....But there are for Boris Johnson’s Ministers and MPs. Up until now the Prime Minister has been doggedly, if clumsily, following the science. But that journey is about to end in a head-on collision with economic and political reality. ......Tory MPs have been sympathetic to the political and personal burden the Prime Minister has been shouldering. But they now expect to him to clear his head, and chart a more balanced course through the coronavirus crisis. If he cannot, or will not, then they intend to chart one themselves. ‘Whitty and Vallance won’t have to account for how they handled all this come election time,’ one MP said. ‘But I will.’
No comments:
Post a Comment